How emotions are 'made': why your definition of sadness is unlike anyone else's

Lisa Feldman Barrett says we need to revamp our thinking on emotions. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, where she applies psychology and neuroscience research to explore how emotions arise in the brain.

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In her new book, How Emotions are Made, she challenges the classical view, which holds that emotions are hard-wired into our brains and generated automatically by distinct regions, making them universally recognisable across all humans. Feldman Barrett argues instead for a more holistic view: the theory of constructed emotion, which she coined. With it, she explores the evidence that emotions are instead created spontaneously, by several brain regions in tandem, and shaped by factors like an individual’s previous experiences.

She talks to WIRED about the logic behind this theory, how technology could make use of it, and calls attention to the unforeseen impacts that our emotional interactions will have on society as a whole.

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WIRED: What does the classical view of emotion say?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: It’s the idea that a small select set of emotions are universal to human nature. The classical view maintains that the brain comes pre-wired with neurons dedicated to a specific emotion, and that they’re triggered by something that happens in the world, going off like a little bomb. The neurons, once triggered, produce a fingerprint that identifies the emotion — like a specific facial expression that is universally recognised. But in every era of scientific study, there is evidence that doesn't match this view. When I observe other people and myself, I realise that I don't have one distinct sadness, for instance; I have an entire vocabulary of sadness. I don't have one happiness, one feeling of awe, or one feeling of gratitude; I have many. And they're each highly specific to the situation.

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What made you believe the classical view was flawed?

I came to the general conclusion that part of the problem is scientists begin with common sense categories [of emotion], and then they search for that distinctiveness in biology — in the brain, the body, genes. I think a better approach is to start with the structure of the brain and nervous system, and try to understand, what kind of emotions could a nervous system like this produce — and how would it do that?

If you think about it from a brain's standpoint, it's trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull, and has no access to the causes of the sensations it receives. It only has the effects, and it has to figure out what caused them. So how does it do this? There’s one other thing it can use, and that’s past experience. The idea is that your brain is constantly predicting what sensory inputs to expect and what action to take, based on past experience. Then it uses the incoming input to either confirm its prediction, or change it. It works this way for vision, hearing, taste—for every sense. I think the way emotions are made is not special: your brain makes an emotion by using prior experiences of emotion to predict and explain incoming sensory inputs, and guide action.

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Can you give an example?

Say in the past you’ve experienced a variety of angers, each with its own neural pattern, pattern of bodily changes and movements. In the present situation, then, your brain has the capacity to make any of these angers, and each will fit the existing situation to some degree. Your brain contains selection mechanisms to help determine which anger fits the situation best.

Do our more conventional, classical views on emotion have real-world implications?

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I just read that there are companies spending literally billions of dollars and millions of person hours developing technology that will read emotions off a face. I think that’s going to be a complete waste of time. You can definitely read facial movements — but the question is what those motions mean. If there's no one-to-one correspondence between an emotion and a set of facial movements, then unless you're capturing the context and what’s going on in the brain, you really can't know what a person is feeling.

Could we use that technology better?

Well, one thing we’ve never really been able to do is observe a person across multiple contexts over time. If I studied you over time, I’d learn about the vocabulary of your facial movements when you're angry, or happy, or sad. I’d learn how to predict your behaviour in context. Let’s say I could do that with 1,000 people: now that technology has made the data so easy I could discover what generalises across people, and what doesn't. This could be very powerful, if we take the big science and apply it to individuals.

Are there links between your own theory and human health?

My collaborators and I recently published a paper on superagers, people over the age of 65 whose memories work as well as a 25-year-old’s. It got a lot of press because it showed that the brain areas most important for superaging are those traditionally thought to be associated with emotion, rather than memory, per se. In fact, many of these brain regions are important for launching predictions. There’s some evidence that physical exercise, or learning something challenging like how to play a new instrument, will help to keep these predicting brain regions thick and healthy. So right now, we’re testing the hypothesis that challenging yourself now and then may help to keep you mentally sharp.

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Are you taking your research in any new directions?

Yes. The theory I've introduced makes it clear that we’re a social species, which means we regulate each others' nervous systems. I can make your heart rate speed up or slow down, just by my choice of words. Something I have a particular interest in is that in the United States there's a problem with the casual brutality of social interactions. For example, in US schools bullying is accepted as a way of life. I believe it takes its toll in a really specific way. If you’re spending all your time in an environment that’s socially harsh, you don’t have the resources to take risks and fail academically—which is what we need to do to create an innovative and creative workforce. So I think we’re affecting brain development in a way that's going to impact society. The emotional climate of a culture is something we should be having serious conversations about: I would like to bring that dialogue to the public. I haven't quite figured out how, but I want to connect those ideas to the biology, to show why this is plausible.

How Emotions are Made is published by Macmillan and is released on March 23.